Speaker 1 0:00
Hello everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of midlife AF, where we are going to be talking about why beating yourself up about your drinking is keeping your drinking more than you'd like to why the root root out is love and not fear, and how to work with our inner critic so that she becomes part of our cheer squad. Enjoy abundant AF. If you're a woman in midlife whose intuition is telling you that giving booze the elbow might be the next right move, then midlife AF is the podcast for you join counselor, psychotherapist, this naked mind and gray area drinking alcohol coach Emma Gilmore for a weekly natter about parenting, quirky teens, menopause, relationships and navigating this thing called midlife alcohol free. If you're feeling that life could be so much more that you're sick and tired of doing all the things for everyone else, if your intuition is waving her arms manically at you, saying it could all be so much easier if we didn't have to keep drinking. Come with me together. We'll find our groove without booze.
Speaker 1 1:21
I lovingly acknowledge the boon people of the Kulon nation as the custodians of Kurt Baroque. I share my admiration for the Aboriginal culture. I witness the connection that they have for each other and the land and their community. As I swim in the waters and walk on the land, I feel the power of this place. I'm grateful for the Aboriginal people's amazing custodianship, the power, beauty and the healing potential of this place. I wish to pay special respects to the elders of the boonwurrung people. Their wisdom, guidance and support are exceptional and felt well beyond the Aboriginal community. I honor that this is Aboriginal land and that it has never been ceded. I am committed to listening to the Aboriginal community and learning how I can be an active ally in their journey to justice. But today, I wanted to talk for half an hour Marcia about um, love and about abundance, because it's our first, our first sort of day in the five day alcohol reset, and looking at, you know, all the responses have been such an amazing group of humans. And we're looking, I'm looking at all the responses around, because the first thing in my work I do is I talk to people, we talk about and we teach. I teach that you are not the problem with alcohol, and this is one of the hardest things for people to get their heads around, because we've been so conditioned by our society to believe that the way to achieving change is by self flagellation. And there's so many reasons why that is our belief system, and it is 100% the opposite of what is required to achieve long start, long lasting change. Now you we, and particularly women, can achieve change through self flagellation. We do that very well. We have dieted most of us and exercised ourselves to change our body shape for most of our adult and often teenage lives.
Unknown Speaker 3:36
So we can do willpower. Oh yes, we
Speaker 1 3:38
can do willpower. But at some point, willpower always fails us, because when our nervous system is dysregulated, when we're tired, when we're anxious, when we're stressed, when we're in having a trauma response to something, when we've had a terrible day, when we've given ourselves no time, when we've not sat down for a minute, we are dysregulated. And what happens when we're dysregulated is our thinking brain goes offline, and the only thing that's working is our subconscious, and our subconscious is all about survival, and our subconscious will all it wants to do is stop the pain. Hello, Mel, good to see you. So all the subconscious wants to do it's like a firefighter. And this is why I always, you know, get very frustrated when people talk about the wine, which, because the wine, which, to me, is a caped crusader. He is a firefighter. He has come to put out the flames of your discomfort. So that is what he's there for. So people are like, Oh, bloody wine, which I went into battle with, the wine which don't go into battle with the wine witch, the wine which is a messenger. She's here to give you information that you are distressed and that you are looking for something to make that pain go away. That is her role, or his role. I don't know why, but for some reason. I think of him as a guy. Hi Susan, nice to see you. So the reason why love is the answer as opposed to fear with regards to alcohol, and it is because while we're beating ourselves up and self flagellating, which is absolutely again, it's almost like don't get cross with yourself for doing that either. Don't get cross with yourself for anything, right? Because the firefighters just trying to save you from the feeling, and then the self flagellation is just trying to to keep you safe from messing up again. So basically, when we're children, these parts get kind of grown in us. So we're born into the world these beautiful, little human beings full of potential. And then gradually, as we go through our life, we start to come a Cup against someone says, Oh, that's not okay, or that was not acceptable, or that was too much, or, you know, you didn't whatever. And so gradually, we start to to grow this little armor, this little protections we have this little wound, and we protect our wounds by growing a piece of armor, and that armor becomes what we call our personality, and it's our personality. Often we think our personality is something that's innate to us, not at all. Most of the time, our personality has been completely constructed by the world around us and is really a mask that we're wearing in order for us to keep safe. But the self flagellation part, the part that we think that we need to knuckle down and really do it hard. And if it's not hard one, then it's not worth doing. And the only way to do something to change is to is to punish ourselves into it right? And all of the science, all the neuroscience, proves it's 100% incorrect, but we still do it. And the reason we still do it, and this is what I was saying to my so I've got a membership group called the be the lighthouse, and at the moment we've got the five day alcohol reset going on. So the five day alcohol reset is a short, little five day course. Be the lighthouse is a group that have decided that they want to be alcohol free longer term. And so we work together on a month by month basis. So it's a slightly different vibe. So what we're treating with the five day reset is just a reset, right? But the lighthouse, we work a little we go a little bit deeper. And so when we're talking about, we're talking about this, this self flagellation. Where do we learn that this is the way to do things. Now, of course, we learn it from society. We hear the drill sergeant da, but what the psychological part of it is that we're born into the world, these beautiful, innocent humans, and everybody tells us the different things that are wrong. Often as children growing up, you know, we were it was important that we were convenient to parents. We weren't, you know, we didn't cause too much of a fuss. We didn't make, you know, inappropriately large emotional reactions to things. We weren't too sad. We weren't too happy. You know, suck it up, bugger cup. The whole thing is whole sort of toxic resilience. We've got to be able to sort of pick ourselves up, dust ourselves down, and not make a fuss. Now, as children, we were taught that. So basically, we taught not to take up space. Our emotions weren't important, and particularly those of us, you know, I would even say I think pretty much every generation, I think the generation my children's generation, are starting to do things slightly differently. But definitely in our generation, it was about the adults convenience. Even if we had wonderful parents, it was still, you know, children should be seen and not heard. You know, don't Molly coddle them all this kind of stuff, because otherwise they won't be tough. They won't, you know, they won't be able to cope in the real world. But actually, all the science tells us that the opposite is true to that, the science tells us that the children who are the most, and I hate the word resilient, but the children who are most able to be flexible, the most able to bounce back, are the children who were held tightly in love and allowed to wonder out into the big wide world, knowing there was so much safety for them and not pushed out beyond before they were ready. And so it's very different to what we've been told. Imagine a world if we were taught how to press our feelings right. Absolutely bloody lately, isn't it? And that is, that is like I reckon, 99.9% of the work, not just for alcohol, but for any coping mechanism we have, right? And I have, I emotionally eat? I I work too much. I have all sorts of ones. But again, you know, it's lovingly, gently loving those parts of us, knowing they're trying to keep us safe. And what are they trying to keep us safe from validating them? You know, these, these parts of us that they're there for a reason. It's, it's funny enough. I was talking in the lighthouse group this morning, and we were talking about, you know, yes, our, you know, we might have drunk in order for us to be able to sit down, in order for us to be able to relax, in order for us to be able to do the things we, you know, we enjoy doing, like dancing or singing or, you know, in. Enabled us to be able to carve out time for ourselves and space for ourselves, even if it was, you know, not real time or space, but it felt like time or space. So all of these things that we think of as like character flaws, are not character flaws at all. They are survival mechanisms. They're coping mechanisms. What a great yeah, that's the type of behavior was modeled to us. It was 100% model to us, and we do it to we do it to our children to a certain extent as well. And even, you know, I catch I have to catch myself all the time, especially as a mum for Neuro divergent kids, you know, I have to catch myself like, you know, this isn't about how you're feeling about this right now, and what you need to be is that safe police and, you know, safe port and storm, but at the same time acknowledging my very real feelings and fear around it. So yeah, 100% now are totally with you on that one. So one of the reasons, again, that we as people, we think that we tend to make ourselves the problem, and one of the things that makes it the most hard, and I would say people who struggle for the longest with taking a break from or reducing their alcohol consumption. Tend to be the people, and often we don't even realize this until we take a break from drinking. But it tend to be the people who are very, very harsh critics of themselves. And that reason for being a very, very harsh having a very, very harsh inner critic is usually because as a very small child, it was important for us to behave in certain ways in order for us to feel like we were going to get validation and love. And this is, none of this is ever to blame parents, right? There's not about blame. And this is the interesting thing. It's almost like, you know, when used to, I don't know about you guys, but we used to get that kind of, you know, I think you know,
Unknown Speaker 11:45
you weren't allowed to have your experience. So
Speaker 1 11:47
you weren't allowed to, yeah, understand, right? If you have a bully in your head, is no wonder you drink at the end of the day, of course, because why would you want to hang out there? It sucks, right? It totally sucks. Drown it out. And that is a lot of the reason why most of most women drink is there's a bully in the head, or there's like, you know, exactly, somebody, not necessarily even bullying by being the inner critic, but also all the shoulds, you know, well, you shouldn't be sitting down because you should be folding the washing and you should be making the dinner and you haven't cooked a healthy, organic meal. For that
Unknown Speaker 12:21
one, it's like, shut the fuck up, please. Of course, we drink, right? Or anything
Speaker 1 12:27
else, whatever our coping mechanism is, you know, for some of us, it's, it's cleaning, you know, obsessively cleaning. Oh, my God, I wish that was my coping mechanism. My house would be. But they're the same thing, but one of them is condoned by society and and the other one is not, you know, it's the same with overworking. You know, we, we productivity is condoned. But actually, it's just as much of a coping mechanism as anything else, right? But with all of these things, it's, it's, we think it's about being mean to ourselves. We think I mean, and I've talked to women, and it breaks my heart when, you know, I hear women say, but I'm the one who picks up the drink. And as children, what happened to us is we, we were born into the world and say, for example, we were talking this morning, say, a parent had a mental health condition, they weren't able to care for us, you know, optimally, right? And this is the thing, it's like small t trauma is going to happen to everyone. It's a fact of life. So it's not about blame, but it's about knowing that our needs weren't met, and understanding why we behave the way that we behave now as children, when the world wasn't. You know, the people who were supposed to take care of us, the people who were supposed to look us in the eye, and no matter what we did, love the hell out of us, if they were a bit mean to us, if we, you know, weren't able to control our emotions, if they only praised us when we got good grades, if we weren't allowed to have a bad day, if we, You know, whatever it might be, those are all you know, over a continuous period of time, they start to shape the way that we look at the world. And what happens with a child is a child cannot believe that the world around it is bad, and it's because it's terrifying for a child right to believe that the world around it is bad, really scary, really scary, because who's going to look after you. Hey. Em, so good to see you. I love your work. I'm always thinking about you, and I'm such a yin enthusiast now, from the Yin that I did with you when we were on retreat with Katie, but just talking about this whole idea of self love and as children, the way we form the idea that we are, you know, that we're at fault, and we continuously try and fix ourselves, is because that is the idea that the world around us and the people that we I'm just reading Mel's Mel just said, Yeah, I agree. A lot of what you're saying, removing alcohol is often the first layer, doing the work comes next. Absolutely. I've been in therapy for two years alcohol free for two plus years. Good on you. And I know em is an alcohol free person as well, to have gone hand in hand. They do. And to be honest with you, I think it's very, very difficult to do the work on yourself when you're still drinking, because if you're still using alcohol, and I know you know people drink as much. You know most of my friends drink. It's fine, no problem whatsoever. And I'm not about pushing my my preference on other people, but I do genuinely believe that alcohol is so bad for us that there's no real reason to want it. It's other than you know, to help soothe us ourselves emotionally, or to help us do something that we feel that we are unable to do without it so it's safer for us to I think it's very difficult to do the work and still be drinking. For sure, I do. I think it's possible, but I think it's very difficult, because I think every time we have a drink, we are abandoning ourselves and self harming. And that doesn't mean that I'm saying nobody should drink, but it means that for me, for it to be, to be, to be aligned with my values, I wouldn't give anybody an alcoholic drink as a present, because to me, it's the number one carcinogen. The the World Health Organization, the heart the heart Foundation, the Cancer Council, they all say there's no safe amount of alcohol to drink. So, you know, drink or don't drink, right? We all do things. I eat too many Tim Tams, but it's, it's really helpful in order to do the work to start going about life without having your reaction to the world around you be based on unseen beliefs that you formed during childhood, like for me, that's, It's, that's,
Unknown Speaker 16:58
I don't want to be having
Speaker 1 17:02
immense pieces of trigger happening to me whereby I am I'm not grounded, and this like I've been personally in our family, we've been going through some really triggering stuff at the moment with a very unpleasant person and and it has trigger when and Every time it gets I get triggered by it. I can feel like I I'm in fight or flight. I can't parent as well. And I know that when, before I stopped drinking, that was happening on so many different levels at so many different times. So it's been very helpful to me. But again, like I said, you know, we all take different risks in life, don't we? And we're all adults, and so I think 100% you do do what you want to do. But just for me, this whole idea of being mean to ourselves, because we one of the things I hear a lot of people are, you know, I've got such a long arm I can only, you know, I have one drink, and then I can't stop, and they make themselves bad about that, whereas, in actual fact, it's chemistry like literally, the way that the body works when it takes alcohol into it is that we go into the survival mechanism, the dopamine side of things. We our body gets flooded with adrenaline and cortisol in a very nasty substance called dinorphine, and immediately the body's trying to find homeostasis. So it's trying to kind of rectify that. And all the times that the blood sugar level levels drop, and all kinds of things happen chemically, that means that from a survival perspective, we're literally fighting biology, not because the body's going I want more of this dopamine because I think that dopamine is something that I need for survival, and it does that because that's the body's rewards. Natural reward system is dopamine. And the thing that with alcohol and first person shooting games and porn is what they do is they create excess dopamine, like beyond what's naturally achievable. And you would listen to someone like Andrew Huberman talk about about this, and say, you know, the amount of dopamine that we, you know, be very suspicious when we're getting more dopamine from an activity then we would naturally get. So, you know, if you, if you climbed a mountain, or you've run a marathon, or you, you know, and then I know that's those are extreme things, actually. That's the ADHD in me, like, Oh, that's very normal. But if, you know, go for swim, like I've just done, go for a swim in the sea, go for a walk, achieve a goal. You know, these that you get natural dopamine, yo. Isn't it such a good book?
Unknown Speaker 19:39
How good is it? But also, like
Unknown Speaker 19:42
I found it really the
Speaker 1 19:46
guy with the machine like that was fascinating to me. But, yeah, it's such a good such a such a good book. Really, really enjoyed that myself as well. But, you know, so So this. The thing. We self flagellate. We're like, oh, you know, I and most people who drink more than they'd like to, they would say exactly the same thing. We always think, it's us, oh, it's just me. Everybody else can just have one drink. That's not true. It's not true. I know very few people who can, like, there's a few people, but generally they'll have something else. Everyone's got a thing, and yet we make ourselves so bad. And also because society, and I would say the recovery movement as well, does kind of encourage this idea that there's something wrong with the person, when actually the person is just a beautiful human being. Alcohol is an addictive substance to everybody, made of blood, skin and bone. It isn't it, you know, there's one thing that all the doctors agree on that, yes, it's addictive. It might be, you know, there might be all sorts of other things that they don't agree on, but it is an addictive substance. And if you drink enough of it over a period of time, you will become addicted to it. And, you know, and we have all this shame. Oh, you know, I've got a relationship with alcohol where I'm drinking more than we make it about us. And again, that comes from this childhood thing of it can't be that the alcohol industry is preposterous and that the government's getting so much money from the tax. That's exactly right, that moral failing. And it comes from, there's a beautiful book. I don't know if you've read this. Mel, highly recommend if you haven't, no bad parts, by Dick Schwartz. We're reading it in my Lighthouse group at the moment, and also in my business group, actually, as well. But he talks about how, you know this all comes from a sort of Calvinist, Lutheran Christian, you know, Original Sin, this whole idea of keeping everybody, you know, just, you know, really controlled, because otherwise they are, we are naturally awful, and we just do terrible things. And, you know, we and we find that the opposite is true again and again and again. And this is where it comes from. It's been indoctrinating us for years and centuries and centuries. And then there's also that passes of childhood that we've naturally gone. It can't be my caregivers. It can't be my you know, and so many of us feel so guilty. Yeah, you've heard of it. It's really good done some part work. Part works is is so good, and nobody parts is great because it's kind of light as well. But yeah, I love that book. It's so good, and I've taken so much from even just like the really basic stuff, because I know that with Dick's work with ifs they get, he gets quite, you know, detailed around things like the firefighters and the manager parts and stuff like that. But I honestly think that's really all you need is, like that really
Unknown Speaker 22:37
basic stuff. Yeah, no worries. Mel,
Speaker 1 22:39
lovely to speak to you. I'm so glad you came on. Thanks for chatting with me. I really appreciate it when people do, it's really lovely. So thanks very much. Yeah, it's, it's this parts work, is it? Basically we've got, you know, because people think, what's the word? I'm trying to think the right name for it now, personality, it's not even called that anymore, multiple personality disorder. It's called something else now. But basically what that is, is a is a much more serious trauma has happened to somebody, and it's been protective for them to split out the different parts of themselves. But as all of us have that to a certain extent, like everything you know, it's all on a continuum. And with with most human beings, we have at least the parts of, you know, an inner child. We have the parts of the firefighter, we have the parts of the inner critic, the the manager, and all of these parts. And is what Dick teaches, and what I teach in my work is, you know, every part of the same with the bun who drinks, right? These are all good parts. They are trying to do something to help us. They're trying to keep us safe from experiencing something that was terrifying. Now, what also happened to us as children? So first of all, as children, we make the decision that actually, we're going to make ourselves bad, rather than the world around us or our caregivers, because we can't control them. We can only control ourselves. So you'll hear about children. You know, when children when parents spit up, they're making themselves responsible for their parents spitting up, even though you know it's got nothing to do with with them. But children take it on themselves because they cannot believe Hello, healthy. Nice to meet you. They cannot believe that, you know, it's too scary for them to feel that they have no control, and nobody's looking after them, and it's not safe. And so we take that, we take that belief into, you know, change and not drinking. And so that's, it's very, very normal. So that's the other thing. Is like, Thank you. The part of me that is so berating me, being such an asshole to me about my drinking, I understand that you have learned and you believe that that is going to help me. And the only reason you're doing that is because you're. Frightened for me, because you really want me to be well, and you really want me to be healthy, and you don't want me to be dependent on alcohol, and you're worried about all the different things. And this is the thing. So rather than going into battle with our judgmental self and saying she's an asshole, it's really about and I started off thinking this, and actually, in the five day alcohol reset, one of my videos. I do talk about this a little bit, and I used to call my inner critic Regina. Regina George from
Unknown Speaker 25:29
come on brain,
Speaker 1 25:31
bad girls. I want to say bad girls, Mean Girls, but, but since, since I recorded that, I've done a lot more work on parts work, and I now understand that it's really it's about nurturing ourselves. It's about mothering ourselves. And one of the things that I learned when I was training under gab or Marty is that that is the one part of us that is always going to be that we can always nurture and love ourselves, is intrinsic to us, and that's the way through. That's the way to answer. Because every time we get caught up in all this. And I'm going to call it drama, in a way. I don't mean that as a you know, some people get offended by that word. What I mean is, you know, when the body is like being activated, it's like a Frisian, a friction. And that, to me, is drama and and one of the things I wanted to talk about today is there's an absolutely wonderful book called The Presence process by Michael Brown, I have done it twice now. It's a 10 week program, and I am going to do it live from next week onwards in the Facebook group. So if anyone wants to buy the book and do it with me, I will be doing it. I'm going to aim to do it at 5:30am now, because it will be on Facebook and Instagram. Of course, you guys can come and join it and watch it whenever you want at the time. That works for you. But the idea is that we read a passage of the book and and it reminded me I've been talking about doing it. This will be my third time of doing it. I love it so much, and it's so good for my mental health, and I've been going through some stuff recently. Really need to do some work on my mental health, and so I'm going to do it for me, so I will be there 530 and I was thinking, normally with the presence process, you're supposed to do it before you go to bed. But for me and my family, that doesn't really work, because I tend to, because both my kids are autistic, we tend to all sleep in together. And it's it's a bit more difficult for me to do it at that time of date. I'm actually better off doing it before dinner. So for me, I think I'm going to try and do it at six o'clock. Will be a time that I'm going to try and do it. So I'm going to try and do it at 5:30am and six o'clock, and I'll read a passage from the book to you guys, and you can, you can have the book yourself. I know that sometimes reading is not helpful for people, and people prefer to see the written word. So again, you know, feel free to download it to your Kindle. Or, my understanding is the hard copy can take a little while to come. So you might want to do a Kindle or an audible but, you know, don't feel any pressure to but if you want to join me, I will be doing that twice today, so it's 15 minutes of continuous breath work, which is like this,
Speaker 1 28:10
after we've read a passage of the book. So we kind of reflect on the book and do 15 minutes of breath work. And I'm just going to do it because I think it will be if I do it keeps me accountable, and if anyone else wants to do it with me, it's a great process to do. I won't really be coaching it on on it or anything like that, unless you know anyone's got any questions, but I will just be going through it with you as a punter. So if any of you are interested in doing that with me, please feel free to join me, and I will attempt to do it. It's a 10 week, I think it's a 10 weeks, 10 week or 12 week 10 week program. So it's twice a day for 10 weeks. And I'll be doing it anyway. So you either you can join me or not, whatever you fancy doing, but if you do fancy doing it, I'll, I will try and do it. I think I'll do it on Instagram, and I'll also do it on Facebook Live, and I'll do it in the midlife AF Facebook group, if I can do it in the be a lighthouse for my crew there as well. I'll do that too, and maybe even on anyway, it doesn't matter. I'll work that out myself. But I just wanted to say, I
Unknown Speaker 29:16
hope that was useful to you all. I
Speaker 1 29:17
hope you enjoyed. It was an absolute pleasure to be with you. Thank you, Mel, for coming on and chatting with me. It was really nice to have someone to talk to while we went through it. And I hope you all have amazing days. I am. Yeah, I'm going to I've actually given myself some space and time. So tomorrow I'm off to Flinders. I'm in Melbourne, and I'm going to have a retreat today, because we've been as a family. We've been through a lot in the last few weeks, and we haven't had the had very much time to to process and decompress and just yeah, get get to peace with ourselves. So I'm off to do that tomorrow, and I will be running my alcohol reset in the evening. I may be doing it from somewhere other than home, who knows? Because I don't want to restrict. Myself on timing, so I might stay at the place and do it there and then drive home afterwards, but it's such an exciting opportunity to be in the car for two hours. Either way, give myself some space and time there as well. The rest of you have a brilliant day. It's been lovely being with you. I hope you are well, sending you so much love. And you know, yeah, if you can be be aware, you are never to blame for any of this stuff. Everything you do, you do for a reason, and the reasons are always, always very good. If it is that you don't feel safe enough yet to be with yourself without using alcohol, there's a very good reason for that. And let's go. As I always say, we go as slowly as the slowest parts of us, right when we're ready, we're ready, and not before All right, so lots and lots of love. Take care everyone. See you soon. Bye.
Speaker 1 31:00
Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of midlife AF with Emma Gilmore. If you enjoyed it, please share on Instagram for your friends and tag me at Hope rising coaching. If you want to help me grow the podcast, please review the episodes for me on Apple podcast that really helps. If you would like to work further with me, please go to my website, www hoperisingcoaching.com for my free and paid programs, or email me at [email protected] sending a massive catalog to you and yours for me and mine, and remember to keep choosing you. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
